Industrial Upgrading and Educational Upgrading : Two Critical Issues for Thailand

This chapter is organised as follows: section 1 assesses the achievements of the Thai education system from an international perspective and the education and skill levels of the workforce. For this purpose, we will use extensively national and international data series. The main lesson is that Thailand lags behind compared to Asian countries and has to improve the quality of education. Section 2 assesses the present state of the Thai industry and productivity. The main lesson is that the contribution of productivity to industrial growth has been low and sometimes even negative. One way to improve this poor score is to strengthen labour productivity thanks to the incorporation of better educated and higher-skilled workers